Hungarian delegates at Oslo World Music Festival

Report by Balázs Weyer

Our delegates’s visit to the Oslo World Music Festival was an outstanding experience for the group members. It provided a lot of musical discoveries, broad networking opportunities with colleagues from Norway and beyond, in depth information to respective musical traditions and also unique insight to a the production of a major festival.

In terms of our project, the delegate discussions and meet ups stood out especially. Music Norway, the Norwegian music export office provided several opportunities to meet a wide range of music professionals from the country. The discussions with festival curators, venue programmers, label managers, broadcasters, ethnomusicologists and expert specialists were not just inspiring but also resulted in a handful of common plans for the future – many of which could become a continuation of our EEA project, such as further performance opportunities of our Sami-Roma musical collaboration in Norway and a potential record release.

The performance of Mari Boine, the most eloquent Sami artist in modern history digged as deep and possible into Sami tradition. (Georg Buljo, one of the collaborators of our Sami-Roma project accompanied her on this occasion). This resulted in an interview and a feature article on Sami traditions in Hungary’s leading music magazine, Recorder. We also had a chance to collaborate again with our project partner, Sigbjorn Nedland’s live radio broadcast.

The main theme of this years Oslo World Music Festival, so sensibly picked and curated by our colleague, Alexandra Archetti Stoelen was „forbidden songs”, tackling the issues of music’s social context and and the potential it always represents to tackle the socio-cultural status queue. Ole Reitov, Freemuse’s chairman’s debate, the opening concert of Emel Mathlouthi, the voice of the Tunisian Revolution, and the occasional conversations with various colleagues from across the Norwegian scene all contributed to the meaningful experience.